In my experience, AMD chips (Athlon 64 and Phenom) hit pretty solid overclocking walls. Vcore increases and improved cooling usually buy less than 200MHz and much higher temperatures and power consumption. If it hit 3.1 on the retail cooler, I doubt it will go much further unless sub-ambient cooling is used. And then, of course, you'd have to work around the cold bug somehow.

Snarkasm is right, the Q6600 is still a better choice—and its based on the original 65nm Core2 architecture developed in 2006, not to mention Intel's inferior interconnect architecture. When Nehalem hits the streets, AMD will loose the only feature advantages it had over the Core2. AMD desperately needs to improve the efficiency of their cores. Phenom is more efficient than K8, but not nearly efficient enough. Additional cache, and higher frequencies will not save them—especially not when they are exceeding 140W TDP.

None the less, at least they are releasing some newer, faster products. I can't complain about that